His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [37]
Besides pacifying Mama Sinatra, Nick Sevano frequently had to run interference between Frank and his wife. Once little Nancy was born—mother and daughter would be forever defined by size—big Nancy developed an uneasy alliance with Dolly out of sheer necessity. Frequently, she had to turn to her two-fisted mother-in-law to bring her husband home at night. Now that the baby was born, Nancy was no longer traveling with Frank.
“Nancy was always interrogating me,” said Nick Sevano. “She’d corner me and say, ‘Where were you last night? Who were you with? Why were you out so late? I called the hotel all night and there was no answer in your room. Why not? Was Frank with another woman?’ God, I’d have to think fast at times. I’d always lie and cover for Frank, saying that we were with another band member in his room rehearsing or something. Then Frank would take me aside and ask me what Nancy had said. ‘Does she know? What did you tell her?’
“Sometimes Nancy would come right out and confront him about other women, crying and carrying on, but Frank would just ignore her. When she really started sobbing, he’d walk out of the room. ‘Let’s go, Nick,’ he’d say, and we’d leave Nancy in tears and head for New York. I’d feel awful about it, but there was nothing I could do. That’s the way Frank is.
“Then Nancy would call Dolly and bring the old lady into the act. Dolly didn’t mess around, let me tell you. She had the guts of a bandit. She’d collar Frank and say, ‘What are you doing with those broads? You know you’re a married man. You have a family now. You can’t be acting like a bum.’ Frank would deny everything, of course, and say the girls were just friends. ‘They hang around the band,’ he’d say. He always had that excuse, but he dreaded those confrontations with his mother. She could be real tough on him. She had that Italian way of keeping her family together, no matter what. She was the one who pushed for that marriage with Nancy. She brought it together, and now she was going to keep it from coming apart. You don’t have to like your daughter-in-law as long as you do what’s right by the family and make your son do what’s right. That’s the way Dolly felt about things in those days.”
Most of Frank’s friends knew that the marriage was over for him within the first year. He made no pretense about his interest in other women and even talked openly about his marital problems.
“It must have been sometime in 1940 … he was a restless soul even then,” said Sammy Gahn. “He told me how unhappy he was being a married man. I gave him the George Raft syndrome. ‘George Raft has been married all his life. Put it this way—you’re on the road all the time, you at least can go home to clean sheets.’ He kind of understood that.”
The first major rupture in the marriage occurred in October 1940, when Frank went to Hollywood with the Dorsey band to open the Palladium, a lavish new dance palace. With the Dorsey band as the star attraction, prices were raised from the usual one dollar to five dollars a person, which included “a deluxe dinner.” After playing nights at the Palladium, Tommy and the band worked all day at Paramount studios making Las Vegas Nights, their first feature film. Frank appeared on screen as the anonymous band vocalist singing “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
“We got paid as extras,” said the clarinetist, Johnny Mince. “Frank, The Pied Pipers, Buddy Rich … I think it was about fifteen dollars a day. Shortly after we got to the studio the band would be asleep all around the set. There just wasn’t that much to do.”
By the second or third day, Frank had met Alora Gooding, a beautiful blond starlet. Within a week, they were staying together.
“This was Frank’s first big love away from home,” said Nick Sevano. “In fact, she was the first big love of his life after he married Nancy. He was crazy about her, really in love with her. She was his first brush with glamour, and he was mad for her. The affair lasted